“Suicide” is a modern concept. In English, the wording did not emerge before the 1650s and in the Romance languages not before the second half of the eighteenth century (“suicide” in French, “suicidio” in Italian). The invention of the latinized term mirrored less stringent criminal prosecution of self-killing, in the wake of harsher punishments and the creation of a statutory offense that had found their semantic expression in the nominalization of “self-murder” since the second half of the sixteenth century.